The Happy Life

November 17, 2011

There is a delight which is given not to the wicked, but to those who worship you for no reward save the joy that you yourself are to them. That is the authentic happy life, to set one's joy on you, grounded in you and caused by you. That is the real thing, and there is no other. Those who think that the happy life is found elsewhere, pursue another joy and not the true one.
— Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 198-199.